Fleet tracking systems allow a user to monitor the position of a vessel or vehicle carrying a position reporting device. For example, the course of a vehicle being tracked can be inferred using successive position fixes sent by the position reporting device. The phrase “position fix” refers to a process of determining an unknown location using a fixed reference point or points. In a similar manner it can be inferred that the vehicle is not moving when successive position fixes report the same position. Fleet tracking systems are commonly used by delivery services for the routing and dispatching of vehicles. Asset recovery systems report the position of stolen or missing property (e.g., a stolen car) to a service provider or to the police in order to facilitate recovering the property.
However, many potential users find the cost of position reporting devices prohibitive. Many position reporting devices have a manufacturing cost in the range of hundreds to thousands of dollars and require extensive and/or crude hard installations in the item being tracked. Thus, the use of position reporting devices has typically been limited to high value items such as cars or other vehicles.
One drawback associated with these hard installed position reporting devices is that they do not always appropriately associate a particular driver of the vehicle with the vehicle itself. The conventional hard installed position reporting devices are able to report the activities of the vehicle itself, but they do not adequately associate the activities of a particular vehicle with the driver.